Obama's 'Clandestine' Plan to Make Bullets Vanish

The last remaining lead smelter, in Herculaneum MO, is closing down.
This will undoubtedly affect the price of lead, since the lead that is
mined in Viburnum MO will now be sent out of the US for smelting.

Former U.S. Rep. Allen West, R-Fla., is joining the National
Rifle Association and other gun-rights groups to warn about a back-door attack
on the Second Amendment by the Obama administration’s Environmental Protection
Agency.

In a column posted on hiswebsite Sunday, West wrote about the Doe Run company’s lead-producing plant in
Herculaneum, Mo., which is being forced to close after the EPA required it to
spend up to $100 million on upgrades.

Doe Run, the last primary lead smelter in the United States,
has been around since 1892 but is closing on Dec. 31.

West accused Obama of using the EPA to advance “backdoor gun
control … while we are all distracted with Obamacare and Iran nuclear
negotiations.”

West argued the Obama administration’s “new extremely tight
air-quality restrictions” have led to the end of lead as the primary metal in
bullets — making ammunition much more expensive and less accessible and leaving
America no choice but to turn to overseas operations to produce lead bullets, a
situation West says is akin to a federal power grab on guns.

“Come 2014, all ammunition sold to civilian gun owners in
America will have to be imported, a result of President Obama’s crackdown on
sulfur dioxide and lead emissions and accompanying harsh Environmental
Protection Agency regulations,” wrote West.

“[This] will surely increase the price and possibly come
under government control,” Mr. West warned, according to a Breitbart.com
report. “It seems this is fully in concert with the U.S. military and Homeland
Defense recent purchase of large quantities of ammunition.”

He said the “chilling effect” is that while the closure of
the smelt plant doesn’t take guns out of the hands of Americans, it does put in
jeopardy ammunition supplies.

As the largest lead producer in North America, Doe Run was
embroiled in a decade-long battle between angry parents, government regulators
and environmentalists, who argued the plant was responsible for high levels of
lead in the blood of children in the area, according to an August story onMid-Missouri Public Radio.

The battles over contamination in the town pitted neighbor
against neighbor and culminated in a flurry of lawsuits. One of them singled
out the EPA and forced the federal government to revise the national air
pollution standard for lead, tightening it by a factor of ten.

Doe Run made
significant efforts to reduce lead emissions from the smelter, but in 2008 the
federal Environmental Protection Agency issued new National Ambient Air Quality
Standards for lead that were 10 times tighter than the previous standard. Given
the new lead air quality standard, Doe Run made the decision to close the Herculaneum
smelter.

Whatever the EPA’s
motivation when creating the new lead air quality standard, increasingly
restrictive regulation of lead is likely to affect the production and cost of
traditional ammunition. Just this month, California Governor Jerry Brown signed
into law a bill that will ban lead ammunition for all hunting in California.
The Center for Biological Diversity has tried multiple times to get similar
regulations at the federal level by trying, and repeatedly failing, to get the
EPA to regulate conventional ammunition under the Toxic Substances Control Act.

“You can own all the guns you want, but if you can’t get
ammo, you are out of luck,” Mr. West wrote, on his blog. “Remember when
President Obama promised his minions that he was working on gun control behind
the scenes? Welcome to it. The result is that all domestically mined ore will
have to be shipped overseas, refined and then shipped back to the U.S.”

Mr. West warned: “Not only will ammo be even harder to come
by, the demand and the process of supply will cause the price to skyrocket even
more. And ponder this: There is an excellent chance that Obama will rig the
market to where all ammo has to be purchased from the government, instituting
an ammo registration. … So America, backdoor gun control is moving forward …
[and] our Second Amendment rights are undergoing an assault by clandestine
infiltration.”

West concluded his editorial by bashing the president’s
“progressive socialist acolytes” for destroying the Second Amendment before telling
fellow GOP politicians, “Now it’s our move in 2014.”